High Resolution Revolution

For a long time if you wanted to work in the world of proffesional post you had to know Avid. Not that Avid was a bad machine, but with a monopoly on the industry why be an innovator? The post house that I have worked at for the last year cuts using Avid Media Composers. They were purchased in 2003 and cost roughly $40,000 a peice. In 2002 I bought a Mac G4 of my own and installed Final Cut Pro. Total cost after everything I added on including Harman Kardon speakers, extra ram, a printer and other software, was $4,500. For $35,500 less, I had my own Edit Suite. The only problem was that I was pretty much limited to firewire as my deck control and my video source, fine for DV, but not the highest quality way to capture an image. Now, with the competition of Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere, Avid is hurrying to release products to compete with this burgeoning market. Their first prosumer box to raise some eyebrows was Mojo. This little breakout box processed video 1:1 and accelerated real-time effects just like the big boys. The only problem, was that the only inputs it offered were RCA (with breakout component capabilities) and a firewire for deck control. Not exactly compatible with the top of the line equipment Avid users are used to. So what did Avid do? Silly, they released Mojo with SDI at NAB 2006 this year.

What is SDI? Serial Digital Interface (inputs) allow uncompressed digital video to be captured rather than digitized, maintaining it's quality from Tape to NLE back to Tape. If you shoot DV, and capture through a deck with firewire, this means nothing to you. But if you are looking to upgrade from your old media composer (which cost you around $40,000) and this time around the block you only wish to pay about $5,000, then Mojo SDI is a dream come true. As an added bonus Avid has also released the Media Composer stand-alone software for $5,000. Imagine that, with all the competition, noone was willing to drop 25-grand for flipping editing software. From what I can tell, Media Composer is better than Express Pro because it allows you to layer 2 Real-time effects rather than one. This is important if you are using animats along with other RT effects.